Underwater Image Restoration Using Fusion and Wavelet Transform Strategy

This paper describes a novel strategy to restore underwater images using fusion and wavelet Transform. Built on the fusion principles, our strategy derives the inputs and the weight measures only from the degraded version of the image. In order to overcome the limitations of the underwater medium we define two inputs that represent color corrected and contrast enhanced versions of the original underwater image/frame, but also four weight maps that aim to increase the visibility of the distant objects degraded due to the medium scattering and absorption. Our strategy is a single image approach that does not require specialized hardware or knowledge about the underwater conditions or scene structure. Our fusion framework with wavelet transform also supports temporal coherence between adjacent frames by performing an effective edge preserving noise reduction strategy. The enhanced images are characterized by reduced noise level, better exposedness of the dark regions, improved global contrast while the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly. In addition, the utility of our enhancing technique is proved for several challenging applications.